1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an auction method for adjusting a reasonable price for a medical service and, more particularly, to a technique for integrating a regular auction and a reverse auction to incorporate supports of many and unspecified third parties into a means to reduce a medical service price.
2. Related Art
Usually, when a person suffers from a disease and receives a medical service at a medical institution, the person needs to pay a medical service price as a counter value for the service. In some countries in the world, an individually paid medical service price is relatively a small amount by virtue of a social insurance system, whereas, in other countries, each patient must pay almost the entire medical service price charged to the patent by a medical institution. When a medical service is given by a medical treatment stuff in a medical institution having high specialties and techniques, a medical service price charged to each patient tends to be very high, however, the patient is usually not sufficiently given an opportunity to raise an object to the appropriateness of the charged service price.
Accordingly, the patient having no scope of a negotiation on a medical service price is in a disadvantageous position in that, even though the patient hopes to receive a desired medical service, he or she has no choice but to give up receiving the service for an economic reason. Particularly in countries such as the USA, high burdens of medical costs are social problems for people except for some with large incomes and wealth, and a remarkable social phenomenon is that even a person in a serious condition cannot undergo a medical treatment just because he or she is unable to pay the cost of the medical treatment.
The problem of increasing medical costs is not a problem only for patients. In many cases, people personally contract medical insurance in preparation for the payment of high medical costs, however, an insurance company faces a problem in that the payment of high medical costs with insurance money presses the management thereof, however, raising insurance dues to be collected from insured persons results in reduction of the number of insured persons. Accordingly, the reduction of increasing medical costs is a fundamental and urgent subject.
On the other hand, taking into consideration of incentives of the beneficiary liability and the market principle under the capitalism, such behaviors as demanding a high charge from a patient as a counter value for a medical service of a high technical level or providing a medical doctor having such a high-level medical technique and therefore taking a large amount of fee should not be the targets of one-sided criticism. The matter of concern is that medical costs tend to increase greatly, resulting in people suffering from even a minor disease cannot receive medical services whereas only a limited number of wealthy people can. Further, high medical costs are not purely the result of the above market principle, but the cost of an expected medical lawsuit and the like is included in the medical costs. Accordingly, the serious problem is that the social environment, wherein some people cannot receive appropriate medical treatments due to the income gap, has actually been formed.
Accordingly, the present invention has been made to solve the above problems and an object thereof is to provide a medical treatment price adjusting method for reducing a medical treatment price to a reasonable amount so that even people with small incomes can receive appropriate medical services when they suffer from diseases whether or not they are insured, and the adjustment of the reasonable price causes no disadvantage for medical institutions and insurance companies as well as patients.